Street cats in India: what nobody counts, what the law leaves out, and what a resident can actually do

How many street cats are there in India?

Nobody knows how many street cats are in India, because no arm of government has ever counted them, and the one figure in circulation is a market-research estimate rather than a census result.

The number you will meet is 9.1 million. It reaches most pages through the only peer-reviewed study of Indian attitudes to street cats, a 2023 pilot in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, which states that "India had an estimated 9.1 million stray cats in 2021" and attributes it to the State of Pet Homelessness Index for India. That index is a corporate data initiative run by Mars, Inc. Its own methodology page says the homelessness estimates rest on "primary and secondary research conducted by Euromonitor International in 2022-2023", on "public sample surveys (online and in the field) of pet owners and non-pet owners conducted by Kantar in 2022", and on interviews with shelters and NGOs, across a global programme that "reviewed 930 sources to select 180+ data points";. The India document the study cites redirected to the project homepage when we opened it on 20 October 2026, so the India-specific working behind 9.1 million was not available to read.

That is not a reason to throw the number away. It is a reason to call it what it is, an estimate built by a pet-food company's research partners for a global comparison, not a count of uncounted animals on Indian streets.

India does run a national animal census, and there is no cat in it

The Livestock Census is the quinquennial complete enumeration that produces every official animal number in the country. Its 2019 round, the 20th, tabulates cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, pig, horse, pony, mule, donkey and camel, then commercial and backyard fowl, duck and other poultry, then one table headed "Dogs, Rabbit, Elephant" and one headed "Stray Dog and Stray Cattle";. There is no cat table, no stray cat table and no cat row. The census even publishes an all-India summary explicitly labelled "Without dogs, rabbits and elephants", which tells you which species sat outside the core livestock count and which never entered it at all.

The consequence runs through everything else on this page. India's stray dog policy argues over a published national number; our guide to free-ranging dogs in India sets out what that number is and how it is disputed. Street cat policy has no number to argue over.

The government asked for a count in 2018 and set a one-month deadline

The Animal Welfare Board of India wrote to every Chief Secretary and to the Urban Development, Panchayat Raj and Animal Husbandry secretaries of every state and union territory on 16 October 2018. The advisory's closing instruction is specific: "it is advised to take urgent steps to identify the population of cats region-wise both male and female with breed details and make appropriate provision for the sterilization and immunization of stray cats mutatis mutandis on the lines of Animal Birth Control of stray dogs and send the action taken report within one month from the date of this advisory";.

Eight years on we could not find a published regional cat population count from any state. The instruction exists, the deadline passed, and the number it asked for is still missing.

What India does measure is sightings, and those are high. In a survey of 763 residents across 13 cities, 738 of them, 96.7 percent, said they were aware of street cats where they live, work or study, and all but one of those 738 had seen one in the past month. The 13 cities were Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Delhi, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Patna, Varanasi and Vijayawada.

Why the machinery built for street dogs does not reach cats

The machinery built for street dogs does not reach cats because almost every part of it, from the van to the kennel to the complaint line, is specified in law for a dog.

This is not an impression. It is in the text of the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023 themselves, which are the rules a municipal corporation actually works from.

Rule 2(b) defines an Animal Birth Control Center as a veterinary facility with surgical infrastructure, post-operative care kennels, quarantine kennels, isolation kennels and "dog transport vehicles with necessary logistics", built "for the purpose of carrying out the Animal Birth Control Program for street dogs";. Rule 10(1)(b) obliges the local authority to provide a "requisite number of vans with necessary modifications for safe handling and transportation of dogs";. Rule 11(11) fixes kennel sizes in feet for dogs. Rule 2(n) defines the Module, which is the standard operating procedure the whole programme runs on, as a document "for dog population management and rabies eradication" that "shall serve as the Standard Operating Procedure for Animal Birth Control program for street dogs";.

So a municipal corporation that wants to sterilise cats owns a van sized for dogs, kennels sized for dogs, a catching squad trained in "humanely capturing street dogs" under rule 11(2), and an operating manual written for dogs. Rule 19 then tells it that cat programmes may run in that same centre provided cats never meet a dog.

The biology makes it harder again. The one Indian study on the subject puts it plainly: "unlike dogs, cats are far more challenging to identify and catch";. The Board's own 2018 advisory describes where they are, and the list is a list of places a catching van cannot drive into: "Stray cats are mostly found in huge numbers in chawls, fish-meat markets, slums, building compounds, even in the Hospitals";.

Five things make a street cat population harder to manage than a street dog population.

1. Counting fails first. A street dog stands in the open on a fixed stretch of road; an unowned cat moves at dawn and dusk through drains, roof slabs, parked cars and compound walls, and no national census has ever tried to count one.
2. Catching needs different equipment. Box traps and drop traps replace the net and the pole, which means a catching team trained on dogs cannot simply be pointed at cats.
3. Housing needs separation. Rule 19(2) and 19(3) require that cats are not housed with dogs and recover away from the sounds and smells of dogs, which splits a single-species centre in two.
4. Complaints have no route. Rule 16 lets the local authority set up an Animal Helpline for "complaints regarding dog bites or rabid dogs", and no equivalent line exists for a cat.
5. Nobody is accountable for the number. Street dog policy is driven by a published count and a reported bite figure; a street cat programme starts with neither.

None of this is an argument that cats matter less. It is an explanation of why an Indian municipal corporation with a functioning dog programme can genuinely say it has no cat programme, and be telling the truth.

The one rule out of twenty-two that mentions cats

The Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023 mention cats in one rule out of twenty-two, rule 19, and in the gazette copy we read in full the word cat appears nowhere else in the rules, the schedules or the forms.

Rule 19 is quoted in full, clause by clause, on our cat sterilisation guide for India, so this page does not repeat it. What follows is the other twenty-one rules: what each gives a street dog, and whether a cat has anything equivalent.

The release rule is the gap that matters most

Rule 11(19) is the clause that makes the Indian street dog model what it is. A dog is captured, sterilised, vaccinated and put back on the same stretch of road, and that is a statutory requirement with a record attached. For cats there is no such rule. Return to the place of capture reaches a cat programme only through guidance and through the funding conditions of the central scheme, which pays for "cat-catching and admission to ABC Center and release to areas from where captured";. Guidance and a grant condition are weaker instruments than a rule, and they are what stands between a sterilised community cat and being dropped somewhere else.

The definition that decides a feeding dispute

Rule 2(j) defines community animals as "any animal born in a Community for which no ownership has been claimed by any individual or an Organisation, excluding wild animals", which takes in a colony cat. Rule 20 then makes the Resident Welfare Association, the Apartment Owner Association or the local body's representative responsible for arranging the feeding of community animals in that area. On the face of it a cat feeder is covered.

Read rule 2(e) before you rely on that. It defines the Animal Welfare Committee, the seven-member body rule 20(2) creates to settle a dispute, as a committee "constituted under these rules for resolution of the community dog feeding";. The duty is species-neutral and the forum that enforces it is defined by its dog function. Our guide to feeding community dogs in India sets out how rule 20 works in practice for dogs, including the designated spot and the appeal to the State Animal Welfare Board. For a cat colony the practical difference is that you will be arguing from rule 2(j) to rule 20 rather than pointing at a clause that names your animal.

Where the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act does reach a street cat

The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 reaches a street cat completely, because section 2(a) defines an animal as "any living creature other than a human being" and the Act nowhere makes an offence depend on whether the animal has an owner.

Section 3 sets the baseline duty: "It shall be the duty of every person having the care or charge of any animal to take all reasonable measures to ensure the well-being of such animal and to prevent the infliction upon such animal of unnecessary pain or suffering";.

Section 11(1)(a) is the clause that covers what actually happens to street cats. It makes it an offence if any person "beats, kicks, over-rides, over-drives, over-loads, tortures or otherwise treats any animal so as to subject it to unnecessary pain or suffering";. The Board's 2018 advisory records that behaviour as routine: "Due to the overpopulation people kicking, hitting and shooing them off is also not uncommon which contributes to cruelty";. The survey puts a denominator on the mildest end of it, with 37.6 percent of 763 residents saying they had at some point shooed off a street cat they thought was being a nuisance.

Section 11(1)(i) covers the other common case, which is abandonment: an offence is committed by anyone who "without reasonable cause, abandons any animal in circumstances which render it likely that it will suffer pain by reason of starvation or thirst";. Dumping an unwanted litter or an unwanted adult cat is that clause.

The Board went further than describing the behaviour. Its 2018 advisory states that "Being pregnant and reproducing on roads, thereby leaving the vulnerable kittens dying due to accidents and other causes is itself cruelty under section 11 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960";. That is a statutory body treating the absence of a cat birth-control programme as a cruelty problem rather than a nuisance problem, in writing, in 2018.

The penalty is the weak part and it is weak for every species. In the Act's text the first offence under section 11(1) carries a fine "which may extend to fifty rupees", and a second within three years a fine "which may extend to one hundred rupees, or with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three months, or with both";.

The one exemption that names dogs and not cats

Section 11(3) lists what section 11 does not apply to, and clause (b) is "the destruction of stray dogs in lethal chambers or by other methods with a minimum of suffering". No matching exemption exists for cats anywhere in the subsection. On the face of the text, the Act's one species-specific carve-out for killing a street animal names dogs alone.

We are publishing that as what the text says, not as settled law, because clause (c) of the same subsection separately exempts "the extermination or destruction of any animal under the authority of any law for the time being in force", which is a general door that clause (b) does not need to go through. The practical point stands either way: nothing in Indian law authorises a resident, a society or a contractor to kill a street cat, and nothing authorises moving one out of its area.

Trap-neuter-return: what it is and what the evidence actually shows

Trap-neuter-return means trapping an unowned cat humanely, sterilising and vaccinating it, marking its ear, and returning it to the territory it came from, and the published evidence on whether that shrinks a population is genuinely divided rather than settled.

The Indian study lists the elements the same way: "humane trapping, surgically rendering cats sterile, ear-tip-cutting for identification, rabies vaccination and returning the cat to the original territory";. The mark is what tells a resident, a vet and a catching team that a cat is already done. The ASPCA describes it as "the humane, safe surgical removal of the top quarter-inch of the left or right ear" and calls it "a widely accepted means of marking a community cat who has been spayed or neutered";. India uses a notch rather than a tip, and the central scheme specifies it for both species: "All sterilized dogs and cats would be identified prominently by way of notching of right ear at the time of sterilization while the dog / cat is still under the effect of anesthesia";. So on an Indian street the ear notch you are looking for is a small V cut in the right ear, not a flat-topped ear.

Now the part that most pages skip. Four studies, run four different ways, reach four different answers, and the disagreement is the finding.

The longest controlled trial, and it cuts both ways

The strongest evidence is a 12-year controlled field experiment over a 20 square kilometre Israeli city, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. Its own framing is blunt about what came before: "Despite the extensive application of TNR, a long-term controlled study was never performed to test its effectiveness";.

In the middle phase the programme ran in half the city's neighbourhoods. One group of statistical areas reached 80 percent neutering, and the authors record that "the cat population did not decline in group 2 despite maintaining a neutering percentage of 80%, a number previously suggested as sufficient for reducing the population size of free-roaming cats". They attribute the failure to "the immigration of intact cats from unneutered surrounding populations".

Only when high-intensity neutering was extended to the entire city did the direction change. In the full-intervention phase the overall neutering percentage reached 72 percent and cat counts fell 23.1 percent across the surveyed area, roughly 7 percent a year. Two honest qualifications come with it. "This population reduction was limited by a rebound increase in cat reproduction and longevity", and the conclusion is conditional: "cat population management by TNR should be performed with high intensity, continuously, and in geographic contiguity to enable population reduction";.

A randomised trial that found almost nothing

A randomised controlled trial in Quebec took 18 cat colonies around barns and stables, 10 to a one-off trap-neuter-return event and 8 as controls, totalling 128 adults and 15 kittens in the treated arm and 116 adults and 23 kittens in the control arm. Between 67 and 100 percent of cats in each treated colony were sterilised, a median of 96 percent, and colonies were still 87 percent sterilised a year later.

The result was a significant difference in adult colony growth at 7.5 months and nothing at 12 months, for adults, for kittens or for all cats together. The authors' conclusion is the one to carry: "a one-time TNR event had a low and temporary impact on the size of cat colonies in this study", and "a one-time intensive TNR event might not be worth the effort if there is no possibility of a continuous trapping effort to counteract immigration";.

The long campus programme that did work

Against those, the clearest success on record is a university campus in Florida followed for decades. Of 155 cats present at the initial census, 23 remained after the first 11 years, and across 28 years "10 (5%) of 204 total cats enrolled in the UCF TNR program, remain on campus and the campus community cat population has declined by 85% from the completion of an initial census in 1996 to 2019";. Two features of that site matter before anyone generalises from it: a campus is close to a closed population, and the programme ran an intensive adoption effort alongside the sterilisation.

The review literature lands between them. A 2015 modelling review states flatly that "Trap-neuter-return (TNR) as currently practiced is often not sufficient to reduce the size of targeted cat populations", and names the mechanism: "Steady immigration and abandonment, in effect, is constantly diluting the sterilization rate of the overall population, and constitutes one of the most significant impediments to reducing population size";.

For an Indian resident the practical reading is that the unit of success is the ward, not the compound. Sterilising the eight cats behind your building is worth doing for those eight cats; it will not change how many cats are behind your building in three years unless the lanes around it are done too.

What a cat sterilisation programme costs an Indian city

A cat sterilisation programme costs an Indian municipal corporation about Rs 2,000 per cat on the only contracted rate we could find published, against a central grant capped at Rs 600.

The central scheme exists and names cats in its title. The Animal Welfare Board of India's revised guidelines carry the "Scheme for Birth Control and Immunization of stray Dogs and stray cats", whose stated objective is "to Control the population of stray dogs and cats by sterilization and to reduce the incidence zoonotic disease by immunization";.

Read the cat line closely, because the headline figure is half a figure. The scheme provides, for stray cats, "50% cost of cat-catching and admission to ABC Center and release to areas from where captured, cost for Pre-operation care, surgery and post operative care including Anti Rabies Vaccination and feeding, up to Rs.600/- per cat", and it describes the money as a one-time grant. The centre pays half, up to a ceiling; the local authority or the animal welfare organisation finds the rest.

Two municipal corporations that have actually started

Panvel Municipal Corporation, in the Navi Mumbai area of Maharashtra, opened a dedicated cat sterilisation centre with capacity for 20 cats at Sector 15, Podhigaon, inaugurated on 22 June 2023. Its veterinary officer told the Hindustan Times that "the PMC is the second municipal body to commence the sterilization program for cats as stipulated by the Animal Welfare Board of India" and that "for every sterilization and even for treatments given to an injured cat, the corporation will pay Rs 2000 to the agency";. The work is contracted to the NGO In Defense of Animals for three years, with a requirement to sterilise 300 cats a year and treat about 200 injured cats.

Nashik Municipal Corporation's general body approved a cat programme in June 2025, extending the animal birth control programme it already runs for dogs. The initial contract period is one year at an estimated cost of Rs 20 lakh, funded from a stray animal sterilisation budget of Rs 3.5 crore for 2025-26, with tenders to be issued to a private agency. Over the previous decade the same corporation had sterilised 80,000 stray dogs.

Put those two next to each other and the scale problem is visible without any editorialising. Panvel's contract is 300 cats a year. Nashik has not published a per-cat rate, and at Panvel's Rs 2,000 its first-year budget would buy roughly 1,000 surgeries, which is arithmetic across two cities rather than a figure either has published. Against a national estimate of 9.1 million, and against a dog programme in one city that has done 80,000 animals, a few hundred cats a year is a start rather than a programme.

How a resident gets a colony sterilised

Six steps, in the order that tends to work.

1. Count the colony first, over a week, at the hours the cats actually appear, and note which are already ear-notched. A number is what makes the request concrete.
2. Ask your municipal corporation's veterinary department whether it runs a cat programme under rule 19, and ask in writing. Cite rule 8(2) and rule 19(1), which put the duty and the money on the local authority.
3. Approach a recognised animal welfare organisation in parallel, because rule 19 requires one with training and expertise in spay or neuter of cats, and in most Indian cities the ward that exists is a charity's rather than the corporation's.
4. Budget for the gap. The central grant covers up to Rs 600 as half the cost, so expect to fund or fundraise the balance. What the NGO wards in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune and Chennai charge a resident is set out on our cat sterilisation guide.
5. Trap in sequence, not all at once, and do the intact females before the males if you have to choose. Leave a nursing queen until her kittens are weaned, because nothing in the Rules protects her timing and the decision falls to the ward's veterinarian.
6. Record every cat: a photograph, the date, the ward, and confirmation it was released where it was caught. That record is what you hand the corporation when you ask for the next round.

Street cats and wildlife: what is established, and what is not for India

Free-ranging cats kill wildlife at a scale that is well measured in a handful of countries and essentially unmeasured in India, and both halves of that sentence matter.

The most cited estimate comes from a 2013 systematic review in Nature Communications, which concluded that "free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3-4.0 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals annually" in the United States, that "un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality", and that free-ranging cats "are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals";. Worth noting that the paper's own summary line states the narrower range of 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals, so even the headline figure has two published versions, which is a reasonable measure of how wide the uncertainty is.

The 2023 global synthesis of what free-ranging cats actually eat identified 2,084 species in cat diets, of which 347, or 16.65 percent, are of conservation concern, drawn from 533 studies. Cats are described there as "extreme generalist predators", and the species accumulation curve had not levelled off, which means the list is a floor rather than a total.

Why none of that is an Indian number

The same synthesis says where its evidence came from, and the answer is not here. Of the 533 studies, 215 were conducted in Australia and nearby islands and 144 in North America. The authors state that "while cat diet studies were found to be globally distributed, most are from Australia and North America, with Africa, parts of Eurasia, and South America all being underrepresented", and that "barring island systems and Australia, there is relatively little overlap with where cat diet studies have been conducted and the world's biodiversity hotspots, particularly in Africa, Asia, and South America";. They also record that the proportion of prey species not yet evaluated for conservation status is 10.64 percent for Asia.

They add the consequence themselves: "the lack of sampling in many of the most biodiverse locations on the planet suggests that we are likely missing critical locations for the evaluation of cat predation and scavenging";.

So the honest position on predation by street cats in India is three sentences long. Free-ranging cats are documented generalist predators of birds, mammals and reptiles wherever anyone has looked. The hardest numbers come from islands and from continents with low native predator diversity, where the effect is largest and least transferable. Nobody has measured what an Indian street cat eats in an Indian city, and anyone who tells you confidently either that street cats are devastating Indian bird populations or that they are harmless is extrapolating past the evidence.

What a resident can actually do for a street cat colony

To help a street cat colony, put out clean water first, fix a single feeding spot and time second, and book the sterilisation third, in that order.

Water comes first because it is the thing nobody puts out and the thing a cat on an Indian street cannot find clean. In a humid Mumbai or Chennai summer a thin cat loses fluid faster than it can replace it from puddles, and in the monsoon the standing water that does appear is the least drinkable water of the year.

What goes in the food bowl is covered in full on our page about milk for cats in India, which explains why the saucer of doodh at the gate is the wrong kindness and what to put out instead. We are not repeating it here.

Eight things cover almost everything else a resident can do, and most of them cost nothing.

1. Put out clean water daily, in a heavy bowl that does not tip, in shade, and refresh it rather than topping it up.
2. Feed at one spot and one time, so the cats come to you rather than to a neighbour's doorstep, which is where complaints start.
3. Clear the bowls and any spill afterwards. Rule 20(1)(iii) requires a designated feeder to leave no litter at the feeding location, and it is the condition a society will test you on.
4. Keep a simple log: how many cats, which are ear-notched, which are pregnant, what you spend. A feeder with a register is treated differently from a feeder without one.
5. Get the colony sterilised, in sequence, and get each cat vaccinated against rabies at the same surgery.
6. Provide dry shelter before the monsoon rather than during it. A covered carton under a staircase lasts one shower; a crate or a hard plastic box raised off the ground lasts the season.
7. Learn what a queen in heat looks and sounds like, because the yowling is the commonest trigger for a complaint and it is also your warning that a litter is four months away. Our page on a cat in heat describes the signs.
8. Leave the socialised, healthy adults where they are. A community cat that is fed, sterilised and vaccinated in its own territory is in the best situation Indian law and Indian infrastructure can currently offer it.

Two cases are worth separating out. A cat that is injured, visibly sick or unable to stand needs a veterinarian the same day, and this page is general information rather than a substitute for examining the animal. A healthy adult cat sitting on a wall needs nothing from you except water and, eventually, a surgery booking.

One habit is worth building early. Give the community cats on your stretch names and keep a photograph of each, because a named, photographed cat is harder for anyone to remove quietly and easier for a ward team to account for at release.

If you are considering taking one home instead, the route and the paperwork are on our guide to adopting a cat in India, and what the indoors then has to look like is on our indoor cat safety guide.

When the housing society objects

When a housing society objects to street cats, lead with the sterilisation plan rather than with your right to feed, because the Indian survey evidence says that is the argument most residents will actually agree with.

Start by accepting that the objection is normal rather than malicious. In the 763-resident survey, more people agreed than disagreed that street cats "are dirty and stink up the place where they are" and that they "are a nuisance and disturb humans with their loud fighting", with over 60 percent agreeing on both. Over 60 percent also believed street cats spread diseases to humans. At the same time 62.1 percent agreed that "the welfare of stray cats is important". Your committee is not hostile. It is both of those things at once.

The number that should change how you open the meeting is this one. 72.2 percent of respondents had never heard of trap-neuter-return, and once it was described in plain language, 64.9 percent agreed that cat numbers should be reduced by sterilising them and 66.1 percent agreed that municipal corporations should run cat sterilisation programmes. The support is there and the awareness is not. An agenda item headed "plan to sterilise the cats in our compound" starts from 65 percent agreement. One headed "my right to feed" starts from a split.

The disease objection, answered honestly

Rabies is the fear underneath most of it, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance. India's National Guidelines for Rabies Prophylaxis state that "in India, dogs are responsible for about 95% human rabies, followed by cats (2%), jackals, mongoose and others (1%)";. Two percent of a large number is not zero. The same guidelines are unambiguous about what to do: "in a rabies endemic country like India, where there is sustained dog-to-dog transmission, every animal bite is suspected as a potentially rabid animal bite, and treatment should be started immediately after exposure", and a single transdermal bite or scratch is a Category III exposure requiring wound management, rabies immunoglobulin and vaccine.

That matters for a cat colony because scratches are common. 18.6 percent of the 763 respondents had been bitten or scratched by a street cat at some point, and 9 percent of those who had never fed a cat still reported being bitten or scratched. The correct conclusion is not that the cats should go. It is that every cat in the colony should carry a rabies vaccination, which the central scheme funds as part of the sterilisation package, and that anyone scratched goes to a hospital the same day. Our page on rabies in dogs in India covers what post-exposure treatment involves.

Four things are worth putting in writing to the committee.

• The duty, not the preference. Rule 20 of the ABC Rules 2023 makes the association responsible for arranging the feeding of community animals, and rule 2(j) defines community animals in terms that cover an unowned cat born on the premises.
• The plan, with a number. How many cats, how many already notched, who will sterilise them, what it costs and over what period.
• The conditions you will meet: a designated spot away from children's play areas, entry and exit points and staircases, a fixed time, and no litter left behind.
• The vaccination record, because it answers the disease objection with a document rather than an argument.

If the dispute goes to the Animal Welfare Committee under rule 20(2), expect to spend part of the hearing establishing that the rule applies to cats at all, for the drafting reason set out earlier on this page. Bring the text of rule 2(j) with you.

Kittens outdoors, and the breeding arithmetic nobody checks

A litter of kittens found outdoors almost always has a mother nearby, and our guide to newborn kitten care in India sets out the watch-and-wait rule, when to step in and how to hand-rear, so this section covers only the thing that page does not: how fast a colony actually grows.

India's own statutory advisory gives one answer. The Board's 2018 letter states that "generally, a cat gives birth to four to five kittens every three months, thereby increasing their population immensely";. Taken at face value that is four litters a year and something like 16 to 20 kittens from one queen.

The best field measurement gives a very different answer. A prospective cohort study of feral cats in managed colonies followed 71 female cats and 171 kittens across 50 litters, alongside a cross-sectional study of 2,332 females brought to a trap-neuter-return clinic. It found that "cats produced a mean of 1.4 litters/y, with a median of 3 kittens/litter (range, 1 to 6)";. That is roughly four kittens a year per queen, not sixteen.

We are publishing both rather than averaging them, because the gap is a factor of four and it changes what a reader concludes. The advisory's figure makes a cat colony look unstoppable and a sterilisation programme look pointless. The measured figure makes a ward-scale programme look arithmetically achievable.

The caveat is real and runs the other way. The measured study was done in managed colonies in a temperate climate with a defined breeding season, and nothing equivalent has ever been run in India, where a longer warm season plausibly supports more litters. Neither number is Indian, and that is the honest state of it.

Why a colony looks stable while losing most of its kittens

The same study measured what happens to the kittens: "overall, 127 of 169 (75%) kittens died or disappeared before 6 months of age", with trauma the most common cause of death. A colony whose visible size stays flat year after year is not a colony that has stopped breeding. It is a colony in which three kittens in four do not reach six months, mostly through injury.

That figure is the strongest welfare argument for sterilisation that exists, and it is stronger than any nuisance argument. Every litter prevented is roughly three kittens that do not die of trauma on a road.

What this page can prove, and what it cannot

Seven claims on this page are documents or measurements with denominators, and five common claims about street cats in India are not established, so the line is drawn here rather than left for the reader to guess.

Two further things we could not verify and are recording rather than guessing. No state appears to have published the region-wise cat population count the Board asked for in 2018, and we found no national register of which municipal corporations now run a cat birth control programme, which is why this page names the two we could document rather than claiming a total.